During a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo, Software Freedom …

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Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman made headlines last year when he argued that cloud computing is "worse than stupidity" and called for users to abandon popular Web applications such as Facebook and GMail. We disagreed with Stallman and pointed out that cloud computing is here to stay and that numerous emerging community-driven initiatives have the potential to bring the values of software freedom to the cloud.

This issue was the primary topic of a presentation made by Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) technical director and community liaison Bradley Kuhn at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). Kuhn has worked closely with Stallman over the years and previously served as the executive director of the Free Software Foundation before participating in the founding of the SFLC. He is best known for his role in authoring GNU's Affero General Public License (AGPL).

Kuhn has historically been a critic of the software as a service model and shares Stallman's concern that the use of the browser as a vehicle for application delivery will undermine the GPL. Unlike Stallman, however, he acknowledges that the growing traction of this model is an inevitability and an issue that needs to be addressed by a more productive strategy than merely ignoring the trend.

Kuhn—who exhibited a significantly more nuanced and informed perspective on cloud computing than Stallman—addressed some of the technical, legal, and philosophical challenges that the cloud poses for free software. He started by discussing the implications of conventional network computing and how modern Web applications are different.

The traditional client/server model that is used for mail and other basic Web services is conducive to software freedom, he explains, because basic protocol standards ensure interoperability between multiple implementations, thus enabling users to choose free software and manage their own servers. He says that this model is compatible with the GPL and the legal framework that the GNU has established to protect free software. That framework breaks down, however, when it is confronted with modern Web applications which encourage users to concede control of their data and rely on proprietary systems.

Kuhn has historically been a critic of the software as a service model and shares Stallman's concern that the use of the browser as a vehicle for application delivery will undermine the GPL. Unlike Stallman, however, he acknowledges that the growing traction of this model is an inevitability and an issue that needs to be addressed by a more productive strategy than merely ignoring the trend.

During the presentation, Kuhn described Stallman as a "network luddite" and explained that lack of exposure and interest in the modern Internet has deterred Stallman from taking an active leadership role in finding solutions for the problem. Despite Stallman's insistence that users should simply reject cloud computing, Kuhn says that Stallman's criticism of the technology should instead be viewed as a call to action.

Kuhn says that bringing autonomy to the cloud is about ensuring that users retain control over their data in addition to protecting the traditional freedoms that the GNU has previously strived to guarantee. Code and licensing are only half of the equation and transparent portability of data is a much harder problem to solve.

Empowering software freedom in the cloud

He believes that the AGPL is the key to addressing the code and licensing issues. One of the problems with the GPL that was exposed by the emergence of cloud computing is that, due to the license's distribution-oriented language, companies that deploy open source components in Web applications are not compelled to disclose changes that they have made to the code. This guts the GPL's reciprocity requirements and reduces it to a BSD-like licensing scenario.

Although that limitation of the GPL is acceptable to many software developers who use the license, Kuhn makes a strong case for the importance of having an alternate license that will close the loophole. The AGPL is designed to serve precisely that purpose—it brings strong copyleft to the cloud.

The issue of data autonomy was also addressed at length during the presentation, but Kuhn acknowledges that the solutions in this area are still a work in progress. He highlighted many of the same Internet freedom initiatives that we looked at in our rebuttal of Stallman.

One example that received particularly strong endorsement from Kuhn is Laconi.ca, an open source microblogging service implementation that is designed around the federated OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) specification. Laconi.ca, which is developed by Control Yourself, is used to run the company's flagship Identi.ca service. Laconi.ca is distributed under the AGPL. Anyone can download the source code and run their own Laconi.ca service which will interoperate with others and any service that has support for OMB. Laconi.ca also makes extensive use of standard formats such as FOAF to make it easy for users to export and preserve their information and social connection data.

Kuhn says that this distributed approach, which gives anyone the ability to deploy and manage their own servers, is much more conducive to software freedom. He says that to encourage a broader shift towards this model, users and developers have to start thinking differently. The data should always belong to the user, Kuhn says, and an application host or developer is the custodian of that data.

I was pleasantly surprised by Kuhn's pragmatic realism and by the coherence of his arguments. His views are a productive departure from Stallman's misdirected ranting. Kuhn deftly sketched out the foundation for real-world solutions and framed the problem in a way that brings real clarity to the issue.